Friendship, Art, and Family Are At the Center of Laura Tucker’s Debut Middle Grade All the Greys on Greene Street
Laura Tucker’s debut novel All the Greys on Greene Street takes place in 1981, throughout the network of streets and artist lofts in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. Part mystery and part coming-of-age story, this classic-feeling middle grade follows the story of Olympia (Ollie), a young artist scratching out black and white drawings while her family life takes a shadowy turn.
All the Greys on Greene Street
Hardcover $17.99
All the Greys on Greene Street
By Laura Tucker
In Stock Online
Hardcover $17.99
Ollie’s father, an art restorer, has left in the middle of the night. And her mother, a painter turned sculptor, who finds damaged objects and turns them into art, won’t get out of bed. While Ollie tries to solve the mystery of her father’s disappearance and make sense of her mother’s depression, she finds some comfort in her scrappy but lovable friends: her father’s business partner, Apollo, and pals Richard and Alex.
Ollie’s father, an art restorer, has left in the middle of the night. And her mother, a painter turned sculptor, who finds damaged objects and turns them into art, won’t get out of bed. While Ollie tries to solve the mystery of her father’s disappearance and make sense of her mother’s depression, she finds some comfort in her scrappy but lovable friends: her father’s business partner, Apollo, and pals Richard and Alex.
Together they traipse the SoHo sidewalks and fire escapes, sitting in messy art spaces and Chinese food restaurants, while Ollie struggles to open up about her mother’s worsening condition and fixates on a piece of stolen art at the center of her father’s departure. Ollie’s life is as layered and textured as Tucker’s prose; all of her inner and outer conflicts intricately woven in the art all around her.
There are Ollie’s colorless drawings, the art gone missing, and the art her mother abandons. There are color studies, like the deep Egyptian brown made of dead mummies or the rich blue Apollo created with her when she was a little girl. A school project about ancient Egypt sends Ollie, Richard, and Alex to the Met and, then, deeper into their own lives. A restless Alex, who can never sit still, mummifies an old stuffed animal while Richard makes a paper mâché ancient monster, and Ollie sculpts the essentials from her life that she would want to keep with her in her tomb.
It’s not until forces send Ollie away from life in SoHo, to the quiet, breezy shores of Long Island, that her perspective is able to shift. She begins to understand some of Apollo’s wise words, the ways we can “make something beautiful out of something awful” and how we can hold on to art for ourselves or “give it away so that others can take from it what they need…” Questions of where and who art belongs to find answers in the messy grey area of Ollie’s life and the many mysteries she unravels.
The necessity of friendship, the ways art can help us hide as well as help us see, are all on display in this rich, complex, and wholly original story about a girl coming to terms with her changing family and her own journey as a growing artist.